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Tag Archives: fiction

Many thanks to Drunk Monkeys for accepting my funny little story “Gaddafi in Drag.” You can read it here. And here’s how it starts:

And then Gaddafi came in, totally in drag. Not just eye shadow, which he was famous for, but a full evening dress, pearl necklace, and hose. Rouge on his cheeks. Four burly female bodyguards tailed him, holstering guns. Besides the slight dip in volume of conversation, no one at the party acted like anything was askance. Gaddafi’s lips were the red, it occurred to me, of that “Say goodbye a little longer” chewing gum, and it was that commercial jingle that played in my head as I watched him walking in heels like he practiced it. It wasn’t like he didn’t have the facial features to cross dress: thin cheeks and high cheekbones like a model’s. (This was before age sunk his face into a permanent scowl, before he insisted on that comb mustache and that sweep of a rug under his chin.) Perhaps this was because I was trained to spot such disguises, but it was obvious to me from the moment he walked in.

Funny enough, this is (oh very very loosely) based on a real story, albeit one that was hearsay on top of hearsay. Of course, for fiction, that’s all part of the fun.

My short story, “Sunsets in Sunny Gardens,” has now appeared in the latest I-70 Review. Thanks to Gary, Maryfrances, Jan and Greg for accepting it. I received my copy in the mail this week and it looks fantastic.

The new issue of Anomaly Lit, featuring my story “The Thing Speaks For Itself,” just came out, and it looks fantastic. “Thing Speaks” is an older story that I reworked a bit before submitting to Anomaly, reworking some sections that had previously never quite felt right. It’s a bleak little piece, but from the tenor of the other pieces in this edition of Anomaly it seems to fit right in.

The editors at Anomaly also asked me to participate in a podcast and talk a bit about the story and my style. I hadn’t done anything like that before, so it was the source of much hand wringing, but I was eventually able to answer a couple questions in (I hope) a coherent fashion.

Thanks for the editors (Lorcán, Roseanna, Oliver and Joseph) for accepting the piece and allowing it to be in such a great journal. (The photography really is fantastic.)

Issue Six of Sediments Literary Arts Journal, containing my story “The Flower Car,” is now available online. I’m very happy with how this issue turned out—great looking magazine and a great home for my story.

“The Flower Car” will be featured on the Sediments home page later this month. I’ll try to update this post when that goes live.

Meanwhile, two other stories have recently been accepted for publication, which is very exciting. Look for “Sunsets in Sunny Gardens” in I-70 Review come later this year, while the other story is (by request of the editors) still a secret…

Very happy to announce that my story, “Space Tears Can Hurt,” a little venture—a bit different for me—into sci-fi, has been accepted for publication in Pulp Literature, a really great journal (“Good books for the price of a beer”) that came to my attention late last year and has published some sci-fi greats. It will appear in the Winter 2016 issue. Big thanks to the editors who have been working with me on some edits.

I’ve read basically two classic fantasy or sci-fi novels ever: The Lord of the Rings and Dhalgren. I’d like to think my approach lies somewhere between the two. I’ll be sure to post again when you can read the story.

My short story “Stare Decisis” was the runner-up for the law blog Lawyerist’s 2015 short fiction contest. You can now read it online, for free, here. Previously, this story appeared in print in the great lit mag Midwestern Gothic.

Thanks to the Lawyerist editors for selecting it—this marks the first time I’ve earned any money from a fiction pub.

Nobody told Walters, upon putting on the judicial robes, how all of his friends would change their conversations around him, how they would treat him differently. Even the longtime confidants—the ones he’d had since college, who remembered him passing out at a party, or caught him falling flat on his face going after a girl, or gave him advice when he was dissolutely smoking cigarettes all day and planning his motorcycle trip across the Badlands—all distanced themselves once they knew he had sentenced someone to death. The couples that he and his wife had socialized with would not get drunk around him. The secret meaning to “sober as a judge” was that you were a buzzkill at all parties. Not that he cared about being drunk—the post-trial hangovers where he’d felt his head unravel in the night which was never quite put back together the next morning, were awful—but it was comforting to see his friends slur their words.

Thrilled that my short story “Stare Decisis” was accepted for publication at the great lit mag Midwestern Gothic. It’s my second fiction publication this year (“At the Turn” just recently appeared in Palooka), and I couldn’t be happier it has found a home at a magazine that highlights great midwestern writing (we’re here, too, NYC and MFA).